A McKinsey partner call: show your technical judgement.

Ask the recruiter what the partner hopes to cover, how long the conversation will last and whether any exercise or preparation material is expected. A short message is enough: “Is this primarily an introduction to discuss my experience and the opportunity, or should I prepare for a specific assessment?”

Ask your recruiter which role-specific conversations to expect, including any expertise interview. Allocate your preparation accordingly. Do not spend the entire evening rehearsing undergraduate cases when the immediate conversation concerns your technical leadership and relevance to a practice.

Still be ready to reason through a business question. If the partner asks how you would approach a problem, explain the objective, the key uncertainties and the next useful analysis.

A senior introduction should tell the listener what kind of problems you are equipped to solve. Select the experiences that establish that pattern instead of walking through every job chronologically.

For a hypothetical technology leader, the opening might be:

My work has focused on turning promising technical pilots into operations that business teams can use. I have led the engineering work, but also the decisions about where to deploy, how to measure value and when to stop. I'm interested in this role because it would let me apply that judgement across a wider set of clients. I'd like to understand where your practice most needs that experience.

Use your real work and motives. The purpose is to give the partner several useful directions for follow-up: technical depth, commercial judgement, leadership and fit with the opportunity.

For each major project, prepare a short headline, a two-minute explanation and the detail needed for a longer discussion. You should be able to move between them without restarting the story.

The headline states the problem and outcome. The explanation covers the central choice and your role. The deeper discussion includes alternatives, evidence, disagreements, implementation and what you learned.

For example, “We deployed a forecasting model” describes an activity. “We changed replenishment decisions to reduce stockouts while controlling inventory” describes the business purpose. The interesting discussion is why you selected that approach, what the model could not do and how people changed their decisions because of it.

Show how your established expertise helps you make decisions in complex, collaborative work. Explain the judgment behind your actions instead of listing tools or qualifications.

Suppose a hypothetical automation pilot reduces handling time from ten minutes to seven across 40,000 tasks each year. That creates 120,000 minutes, or 2,000 hours, of potential capacity. It does not automatically establish a cash saving.

Be ready to explain what happened to that capacity. Did the team avoid hiring, reduce overtime, handle additional demand or improve service? Which costs changed, and which remained committed? Were there software, review or maintenance costs?

A strong explanation might say: “The pilot released roughly 2,000 hours of capacity. We used it to absorb growth without adding a planned role. The financial case depended on that avoided hire, not on multiplying every saved minute by salary.”

That is an illustrative answer, not a claim to borrow for your CV. Apply the same discipline to your own metrics. Know the baseline, the time period, your contribution and the evidence linking the intervention to the result.

Senior work involves more than having the right analysis. Prepare a moment when another credible person disagreed, implementation was harder than expected or the original plan needed to change.

Explain the competing priorities fairly. What was the operations leader protecting? Why did finance resist the investment? What risk did the technical team see that others missed? Then explain what you did and what trade-off remained.

Avoid making every story a victory over unreasonable colleagues. A thoughtful account of changing your own view can show more judgement than a flawless narrative in which you were right from the beginning.

Use the partner's public profile and relevant published work to identify questions you actually want answered. For a senior specialist conversation, I would prioritise the work and expectations:

• Which client problems would this person be expected to lead in the first year?
• How does the role balance technical depth, team leadership and developing client relationships?
• Where do projects most often struggle between analysis and implementation?
• What support helps experienced hires learn the firm's way of working?

Choose two or three and follow the answers. If the role's scope is unclear, resolve that before asking broad questions about firm culture. The discussion should help both sides assess whether your experience fits the need.

Before time runs out, ask what further information would be useful and how the process proceeds. Let the recruiter confirm the formal sequence. A productive introduction can lead to several different next conversations depending on the role.

Send a brief follow-up naming one useful point and completing any agreed action. If you promised a CV or project summary, send the relevant version. If nothing was requested, a specific thank-you is enough.

Your preparation has worked when the partner can explain what you bring and you can explain what the opportunity requires. Keep that as the aim of the conversation.